The floppy disk icon has always frustrated me. Though I still haven't seen a great replacement. Would love to see this list with more thoughtful options to use instead.
the floppy disk icon for saving is a bit of an anachronism, but so is saving. there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of value in re-imagining the icon for an action that is mostly unnecessary in modern apps.
It's because "saving" is an activity that exists only to appease computer architecture choices. It's not a natural thing to do at all.
A more humanistic approach would be to save versioned history of everything you do and then "save" by marking points in time as versions you would like to share with other people or systems.
The idea that people don't know what a cog or a wrench is seems like the author is taking this a step too far. I wouldn't call those things "shrouded in mystery".
Similarly there are still plenty of microphones that look like that, they're professional microphones, not "old fashioned" ones.
Plus, once a reference is established (like the floppy disk) it's idiotic to always replace it with the latest tech (we'd have zip drives in the nineties, usb drives in the '00s, the cloud today, etc etc..)
Floppy drive -> dresser, dresser drawer, kitchen cabinet ... File cabinet. Although I suppose not-old people don't do paper anymore. Plastic storage container? Warehouse. Glovebox (and why is it still called a glovebox anyway?). Bookshelf.
It doesn't really matter as long as it's roughly ubiquitous, which the floppy drive is. It doesn't even matter if no one's seen a floppy drive; if someone doesn't recognize what the floppy icon does, then the rest of their computer is new to them and they're learning. Once learned, forget about it.
> Plus, once a reference is established (like the floppy disk) it's idiotic to always replace it with the latest tech (we'd have zip drives in the nineties, usb drives in the '00s, the cloud today, etc etc..)
Other things I still see regularly in my day to day life, know (young) people that use them or even use myself sometimes: address books, calendars, manila folders, phone handsets, magnifying glass, binoculars, envelopes, screwdrivers, carbon copies of stuff
This discourse goes beyond the anachronistic references indicated by these icons and calls into question our entire system of interface metaphors. At one point in time imagining the information stored on your computer as a system of "files" and "folders" was pivotal in transitioning a society from the physical world to the digital one. Now that the transition is largely complete and many people are coming of age who have never known a world without computers, its time to move beyond anachronistic metaphors. We must discover new means of interaction that take advantage of the unique features of the digital medium.
I would like to hear an "explain it to me like I'm five" that explained what computer "files" and "folders" are and how they work without using the words or their associated metaphors.
I agree some of the actual system specific icons and metaphors are outdated and junk, but I guess I'm in the camp that thinks these basic metaphors are actually useful in the education of computer interface / mechanisms.
>Now that the transition is largely complete and many people are coming of age who have never known a world without computers, its time to move beyond anachronistic metaphors.
They might have been metaphors once, now they are idioms.
The people who "have never known a world without computers" have also never known a world where there weren't filesystem folders and files.
CS Lewis said that ""All language about things other than physical objects is necessarily metaphorical." I can't find the examples he gave, but from your sentence: we must "discover new means of interaction that take advantage..."
"Discover" is made of "dis-cover", meaning "remove the things covering the other thing." The "inter" in "interaction" implies movement between objects in a physical space. To "take advantage" evokes physically grasping something.
Perhaps this is more philosophical than you wanted, but I doubt we'll be leaving behind physical metaphors anytime soon.
Well many large diaphragm condenser mics look like that because that's what the footprint of that kind of microphone is! And Shure still faithfully makes the Super 55, your iconic "Elvis mic."
The hot trend for visionary types to do today is wax on about how kids these days only text and use Facebook between Netflix show. Everything else is just too difficult, supposedly.
The article began with an introduction to what could have been a really great dialogue. Why do those who didn't experience the inspiration for icons still inherently understand them? Yet it dropped that in favor of the same schtick for each icon.
I think that the point, which the article may miss, is that we don't inherently understand them. We have to be taught to understand them—but we only have to be taught once to use a given set of icons, so it's good to use the same ones other people use, even if they're meaningless.
(I'd draw an analogy to "Why do we inherently understand menu items written in English?" We don't inherently understand them (witness non-English speakers); we just get to draw on our existing familiarity with English to make the understanding easier.)
Agreed. It's no longer a floppy disk. Its meaning in the new context has a life of its own. The fact that the metaphor no longer has any connection with is original context IS the reason why it is now effective! :)
"When things, signs or actions are freed from their respective ideas, concepts, essences, values, points of reference, origins and aims, they embark upon an endless process of self-reproduction. Yet things continue to function long after their ideas have disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their own content. The paradoxical fact is that they function even better under these circumstances."
The difficult part about reading this thread was having to ask, after every point, "well, then what?"
Out computer verbs are based off of (admittedly, maybe outdated) similar verbs. Our electronic work mirrors our physical work solely because of the limitations of our language constructs. I have it on good authority that there is not a single language that has words that that specifically define what we do on a computer that would be better suited and more efficient than a physical-describing counterpart.
So, as mentioned earlier, the floppy metaphor: OK, I get it. But clipboards, bookmarks, Manila folders? How would you describe an object that lets you take information from one place to another in 32px? What physical object are you aware of that allows you to mark your place amidst a vast density of information? Don't even get me started on the folders.
It's coy to label them "old-people icons" -- it's clever, I dig it -- but if tomorrow we were to unveil a new set of nouns and verbs to describe computer objects, the reigning argument would be that they never made sense at all.
And have fun trying to explain to your grandfather/mother/nephew how to uses computer without having any real-world jargon to borrow from.
Who cares? A floppy disk nowadays is the thing that indicates "save", and that's it. You don't have to have seen a floppy disk to know that it's the save icon. If that were the case, company logos would be objects. A swoosh is Nike, and that's that.
Sure, but if you're not old enough to know what a floppy disk is, someone would first have to tell you that the floppy disk was the save icon. I think the op's point is that icons are no longer making the user experience intuitive, they are actually adding another step. Young people have to figure out what they represent first before they use them where the point of an icon is to eliminate that step.
Definitely, but I didn't know what a clipboard was before I started copying and pasting (text on the computer)... You probably learn which button is "Save" when learning what saving actually is, I don't know how intuitive the pictograms for these actions can be.
I'd love to go to schools and get kids in groups like <15years or <10 years and ask them to design icons for these things and see what they come up with. They have a lot less cultural history and technological history. might be interesting.
Or maybe they've learned all these icons and while not getting what they did mean, they understand what they mean now, like letters of a new alphabet. Like how many Asian script characters are descendants of more obvious pictograms of actions. They still have meaning even if they've evolved a bit and even changed.
UI designers are constantly forced to come up with new icons for crazy new features.
It's a common practice to look for it on Google images, i.e. "Save Icon", and see if there's a common metaphor. If not, you look for similar use cases - something so that it's much quicker for users to grok what it does.
That's the fundamental purpose after all.
This was the problem with Google/Android's new icons as well as GitHub. Google got caught up with minimization and left out the telling differentiators. Githup went nuts on illustration and lost the original meanings.
Yep, and you have supposed "leaders" like Apple that just give up and stop trying. Apple widely just throws up a button with a "gear" on it when they're too lazy to organize functions properly. And there's no telling what the gear button will do.
Even worse is the Easter-egg UIs that are becoming a widespread problem: There's no icon (or even control) at all until you accidentally roll the cursor over the area. WTF? Are users supposed to sweep across every pixel on the screen now, looking for hidden goodies?
Not sure what the gear is you mention, but I can't think of another company that has Apple's drive for intuitive UI, which is the fundamental purpose of icons.
In contrast, HN is a text-dominant application designed for text-dominant users...
Pinch isn't zoom. Unpinch in zoom. It would be intuitive for pinch to close an app, but not more intuitive, because in some apps your intent to zoom out could be confused with wanting to close the app (mobile Safari) and for other apps accidental finger brushes might cause an accidental closing of an app. The way touch gestures work now actually make a lot of sense. It seems like you're reaching.
What flat surface do you close by pinching it? Moreover, it seems you're trying to equate "intuitive gesture" with gestures people use with (non-computer) everyday objects, but I don't see why that is a requirement for intuitiveness.
Pinching to zoom in and out makes a lot of sense in my mind. Place your thumb and index finger at two points on a map/image/website. Those two points are two corners of a visual area. To make that visual area larger, expand the points outward. To make the area smaller, pinch inward. This conceptual mapping is very straightforward.
that reminds me of when, in 1999, some researchers installed an internet kiosk in a poor village, and children taught themselves to use it, despite not being able to read the language.
> Children invented their own vocabulary to define terms on the computer, for example,
“sui” (needle) for the cursor, “channels” for websites and “damru” (Shiva’s drum) for
the hourglass (busy) symbol.
This experiment made me happy. I remember times in the school computer lab when we surfed and did whatever we liked with the installed software, all during our computer literacy classes...nice to see people everywhere having at least the chance to do the same.
In another of his papers, Prof Mitra wrote about how "aspirational learning" could be conducted, in the sense of letting children watch interesting and inspiring videos from TED Talks, et al, which would inspire kids to consider what they could do for the world with dreams, technology, and hard work. I think that's absolutely a great thing to spread. In too many places people don't do new things simply because they don't realise they are possible.
I've often thought about the issue the author brings up. I'm not sure what the case is now, but when I was a kid (15 or so years ago), cartoons were full of anachronistic items that I probably never would have seen otherwise.
Generally when you farther back, items become more differentiated and easily identifiable. A lot of these cross over with computer icons - telephones, antennas, alarm clocks. I really wish I could find a good listing for this type of thing, but my google fu is failing me.
From the stackoverflow thread linked by rapidnsnail:
> I tried this on my 9 and 13 year old nephews. I asked what does this button mean? "Save" they both answered immediately. Then I asked what the image looks like? They had no idea - not even a suggestion (which is fair since they haven't ever seen a disk). So I guess the meaning has overriden the image itself in the icon so we're stuck with it.
That doesn't fit many use cases. What if you want to preserve a particular version of the file? Yes, I understand all versions are kept in the infinite rollback history, but what about the UI element?
In anything with an auto-save-by-default workflow. Consider draft messages in modern mail clients. Some still have a manual 'save' button. But that's a transition thing. They'll go away as users learn they can trust the autosave.
Most of the awkwardness in Lion came from the shortcut keys having been wrong and the effect having been jarring for its lack of vestigial commands to ease the minds of those not-yet-convinced.
I find this new workflow nice by itself, but what's driving me batty is having two models side by side i.e some apps use open/save/save as while others use open/autosave/versions/duplicate.
That makes it obvious where the symbol is coming from. The only problem is that those kinds of folders are not commonly used in Germany. I think I never saw a folder like that before I started using computers.
It took me many years to work out that that the Mail icon I saw everywhere with the little red flag was a U.S mailbox. Where I live mail comes through a slot in the door.
It does in city/residential neighborhoods in the US as well. Outside of that, a mail man cannot walk door to door, so he delivers them from a car. I'm now wondering how that is handled in your location?
Around halfway through I jotted down a few thoughts. I like and appreciate people thinking about this sort of thing however, so I'm not saying any of this to offend.
> I don't see any reason that we couldn't be storing our files in abstract squares rather than folders in the sky.
...because they're called folders, and we know how to use them? If I said, "Here, have a square," is your first instinct really to think oh! that must be for putting stuff in/on? Sure, you can abstract them to just a symbol but it's unnecessary. It's not like the system cares what you call it or how you choose to display it.
> The world's most advanced phones include an icon that looks like a phone handset that you haven't touched in 20 years, unless you've used a pay phone recently.
I have in fact, but that's not the point. Again, we know the shape. There aren't many things it could be besides a phone. You could show someone a glossy brick I guess, but what good would that do? The best alternative I can think of would be something like a speaker or microphone, but where's the argument that that would actually be better?
> At some time in the past the magnifying glass became the "search everywhere" icon, but for some reason binoculars are for searching within a document.
I'm just now realizing that he must be thinking of a specific piece of software. I gathered he was on Windows, now I see he worked at MS. Is this Office? This one I agree with, but it sounds like a quirky error made by some engineer or perhaps phony UX consultant. Same goes for the clipboard– hell if I know why MS would use that icon for paste, but in no other software that I can think of is that normal.
> Envelopes
Same thing as folders. So our terminology expanded to cover abstract digital entities, but that doesn't make it a hinderance to our intuition. Folders, packages, envelopes... maybe they're too nostalgic for the bold futurist, but generally it's about as practical as you can get.
> Wrenches and Gears
Who hasn't used a screwdriver? Or never seen a wrench? Even the people who don't own one probably know what it is. I'm indifferent to the gears/tools thing. It still makes sense, but I'm open to new ideas– preferably a little more clever than a circuitboard.
> Microphones
For speech recognition, would an ear be better? I think most people would get the microphone bit simply from watching cartoons, talkshows, album covers etc... but I admit this will likely be more foreign in the future, and is already disconnected from people in developing countries without that much media exposure (although they apparently have an iPhone/Pad/Pod).
> Photography
It's kitsch. It still makes sense because the alternative to a square with a border is a square without a border. But for all of us who still use medium/large format cameras from time to time or for work, we can simply pretend. Lenses are a-OK.
> Televisions
Actually, for the large number of people who gave up cable for hulu and netflix but still want to catch the news– yes! I do have rabbit ears! Maybe it's a little too retro for most video icons, but again– it till makes sense, it just may be better suited to apps that show live broadcasts.
> Carbon Copies and Blueprints
Eh, so the term's (carbon copy) a bit outdated. But then again, when was the last time I "pasted" a document together? Yeah, Drawing I. As for blueprints... it makes sense for XCode right? And CAD. We may not use blueprints so often anymore, but it's less ambiguous than "construction documents," which might as well be "layouts". Which might as well be squares with a shape on them. Etc...
Basically, this would be a far more interesting post if the author would go further into making actual suggestions. Some of it makes sense because it's intuitive, some of it makes sense because we're used to it. If you want to correct the latter, you've got to show something what's better.
Edit: ouch, that's an ugly post. Not sure if I can format it in any way.
The only real issue I have with it is that it's no more about the clipboard than copy– they're both related but neither one is it. I think in this particular example it's not so obvious that anything is coming off the clipboard. I can see it's being taken off, but it's too subtle for a cursory glance especially if I'm not used to it. I suppose I don't really have a problem with the symbol, just the icon in particular.
I'm 32, and I'm not completely sure what an actual jar of paste is. I've certainly never seen one. Logically, I'm presuming it's used as a paper adhesive (like wallpaper paste). I'd use the verb "to glue".
So "copy and paste" or "copy and glue". How does pasting go with copying? I copy something to the clipboard (...whatever) and then copy it from the clipboard to my document. How is that like gluing something? It really makes no sense.
And then I remember cutting. "Cut and paste" makes more sense. You might cut something out of a magazine and glue it onto a collage. Okay.
But the point is that none of this matters. "Paste" is a new word that means to copy something from your "clipboard" to the current location. It's not a metaphor anymore, it's a thing in its own right. A new definition for an old word.
I could imagine a "thought bubble", as used in cartoons, for the clipboard. Ok you'd have to be careful to distinguish it from a cloud icon (not very hard), but that would perfectly fit the metaphor in my head whenever I copy/paste: to have the computer "keep something in mind", remember something, strictly short-term memory of course.
I think the blog post goes to show that much like words change their meaning over time, icons can also come to represent objects that are much different from their original metaphors. As new generations of people learn to associate concepts with the icons that embody them, the original metaphor loses its importance.
To give an example, the word "microphone" has only been used to represent modern microphones since 1929. The term referred to the mouthpiece for a telephone between 1929 and ~1878, and from ~1878 until 1683, it described ear trumpets.[1]
The common thread in most of these is dematerialization: like the phone example, discrete physical objects have been replaced by software functions running on generic computing devices, i.e., the main cause of obsolescence is the system itself.
So what can the system use for icons? Rows of "smartphone" icons or "computer" icons?
(As a text-mode purist, I am not too sad about this.)
I use both myself, depending on whether I'm using the mouse or a terminal, i.e. I "open a folder" but "list a directory". I've heard others do the same.
If you're in your late 20s (and a computer nerd), you probably grew up with DOS: CD, DIR, etc.
Besides, if you're a programmer on Windows, even if you're really young and started with .NET, I'm pretty sure the API and the MSDN docs still consistently use "directory" throughout.
I'm 20. I heard both terms used interchangeably while I was learning how to use computers and I use them interchangeably in the course of discussion now.
I need to remind myself to say "folder" because the kids (8-12) I teach probably won't get it if I say "directory"--and then getting them to grasp the concept of local and remote files (for making websites) ... in the presence of the way-too-useful-not-to-have but again completely different concept of "Dropbox folder" ... :D GREAT FUN!! No, really :)
And yes, the floppy disk. Whenever I want to feel old I ask one of them if they know what that icon is, and whether they ever seen one. Best answer: "Yes ... I think I saw one at my grandmother's house ..."
Then I tell them it would fit barely half an mp3 and tell them how many you'd need for the same storage as this 2GB Micro-SD the size of my fingernail :D I love living in the future!
Alright: I generally do call them directories. I grew up in UNIX. But we're talking about icons and UX here. Do you consider the "desktop" to be so infantilizing as well?
They're both models for (basically) the same thing. The technical incorrectness of folder doesn't interfere with usage in real scenarios, unless you expect Average Joe to be structuring data as opposed to, say, collecting media. Granted, if Average Joe had mild OCD and thought of everything he did as indexes and references to some abstract node then directories clearly makes more sense, but that would be a separate system divorced from the desktop abstraction.
Edit: Being young of course none of this is really hammered in by convention– maybe that's why I don't mind the two abstractions coexisting. Even if the terminology originated in a Windows era, it doesn't bother me in the least that Mac (and others) use it as well (for the reasons stated above).
Alright: I generally do call them directories. I grew up in UNIX. But we're talking about icons and UX here. Do you consider the "desktop" to be so infantilizing as well?
Why yes, yes I do. Desktop environments are all attempted answers to the question "why is a computer like a writing desk?" The question is absurd in its own right, but carries additional absurdity baggage such as calling all files "documents". A movie is not a document. A computer program in binary form is not a document.
All of my machines boot into bare-ass window managers -- typically either awesome or WindowMaker. It's simple, cruft-free, and leaves more room for the programs I want to run. Aside from the shell I find an activity-based model for launching programs -- such as found in iOS, Android, OLPC, and even Windows 3.1 for pete's sake -- to be infinitely preferable to the document-centric desktop model, which assumes that the user can't fathom a computer without the machine pretending that it is some older, non-computing, manually-operated piece of office equipment.
Even if the terminology originated in a Windows era -- it didn't. It started with the 1984 Macintosh. Funny that, even Apple is moving toward an activity-based model for iOS.
In that case it seems you've made a great case for why programmers make terrible interfaces and why UX is so important for everyone else. While models can certainly be adapted and evolve (as say iOS vs. a command line), I find it silly to try and put them in the same category. Maybe I'm begging to be flamed, but I don't see it as being much different from arguing over programming paradigms and high vs. low level. Do I really care that if a string is an array of pointers or not while developing a web app? I don't have to "pretend" that the computer knows exactly what I mean when I tell it to puts "hey"– but unless the underlying process has a meaningful effect on the current process, then it's all moot.
The desktop model's heyday may be passing right in front of us, but more likely than not the consequences are going to lead towards even higher level abstractions. For fertility, and for clarity (so that engineers can talk to engineers, and everyone else doesn't get mistaken for a really stupid engineer).
I still call them directories. "Folders" are for toddlers who do not know the tao of unix. So are icons. Real men stare at text all day, eat with their hands and sleep when they're dead. The funny/sad part is that I'm half serious with these statements.
Directories in Unix were/are files that just contain pointers to other files. So they are a bit like a directory in a building. However, "folder" is probably an improvement if you think in terms of it _containing_ other things. Folders are still recognizable real things. Ask any hipster. Now let's talk about folders that contain other folders and so on. There is where the physical metaphor gets strained. Still, it's fine and quite contemporary.
And then there is the powerful and ancient weapon - the arrow. When was the last time arrows had heads like this ->? What would we substitute them with in our flow charts and graphs (the nodes/edges kind)? What would we use instead to point people to restrooms? Haskell would be deprived of a major theoretical weapon, not to mention a notational glue of its famous type system (a -> b is the type of a function that takes type a value and yields type b value).
Actually the post points out something interesting - we are in the midst of a transformation from a pictorial communication system to an ideographic language where the connection between symbol and signified becomes arbitrary. Nothing wrong with that "arbitrariness", but the visual language continues to evolve - maybe we'll see a paper clip icon even in "Avengers"-like interfaces for this reason.
"Carbon copy" is not an outdated term, I use or see other people use one at least weekly: receipts, package delivery, doctors recipe, etc. It might not be actual carbon, though.
I looked into replacing the old AM radio in my ancient dodge with a modern one, but eventually decided I simply liked the look & feel of that pushbutton thingie, and anything more modern just looked wrong in that car.
I use an SD card (one way or another) almost daily. It would only take a small amount of reworking to make the "floppy disk" Save icon look like an SD card and still look enough like the original icon to not confuse people. The cloud is cool and all but many devices (even cloud enabled ones) make use of some sort of physical storage. Many devices do not have the capability (or even the need) to get data straight from the cloud (or at least can't if they aren't able to connect to cell/wifi).
> It would only take a small amount of reworking to make the "floppy disk" Save icon look like an SD card and still look enough like the original icon to not confuse people.
What would be the point, though? Surely the floppy disk icon has more meaning now as "save" than as the original metaphor of "save to floppy disk." Besides, SD cards are outdated now - I think the only thing of mine which uses it is my camera, and I never actually remove the card. I would guess that more people would recognize the floppy disk than the sd card.
This headline illustrates the importance of the hyphen.
The headline refers to "people icons" that are old. I went to see how many people icons there could even be. Turns out that what he really means is old-people icons.
There's a good article to be written on this subject, but this isn't it.
"folders": we can go back to "directories" if you'd like. It's still what I say most of the time.
"wrenches/screwdrivers/gears": This was the most baffling one. Who's never used a screwdriver? And he says it as if it's obvious.
"phone": 75% of the US still has a landline (as of a year ago anyway), so I find "you haven't used this in 20 years" to be a rather dumb statement too.
"tv antenna": Antennas have actually come back recently when broadcast stations switched to digital and HD feeds. This would have been a better criticism ten years ago, and makes him the one that sounds out of date.
When I saw the article title, I figured "floppy disk" = "save". And sure, that's somewhat valid. But as others have pointed out, it's idiomatic. It happens in language all the time: people still say that someone is given "free rein" even if nobody involved has ever ridden a horse.
And he missed the "film" icon for movies. I think about this one when I see the stylized movie-chain trailers in theaters: What percentage of the audience even knows what that strip is supposed to be?
The obvious response to all his critiques is that they're all idiomatic. Apple didn't choose a handset icon because everyone is familiar with those old handsets, they chose it because everyone will know that the icon means "telephone." Sure, it's fun to go back one more "etymology generation," but it's not necessary.
"phone" - The shape he's talking about is this one[1]. While the Wrench/Screwdriver etc. are in common use, the shape here is from the rotary phone, which is not in common use.
The page I linked was literally the first google image result for me, and that top cluster of images includes many recognizeable clip-art phones, all with the same rotary phone shape.
That isn't necessarily true. He doesn't specify rotary phones.
Even if he did, like the folders and envelopes he also mentions, corded phones which look like the picture are still quite common in office places and thus many peoples lives outside of silicon valley.
At the last two offices I've worked at, the landline phone (VOIP Handset) looked like this :[1]. Not a whole lot different from the smartphone Phone app icon.
I agree, I was very surprised that he doesn't even mention the "hourglass". It's true that it's less and less frequent but I would argue that it's more common than the floppy disk.
While "hourglass" may not be a commonly known term, I would imagine plenty of young kids still recognize it thanks to boardgames that involve them. Well, I hope plenty of young kids play boardgames, anyway.
Fun read. However, if the suggestion is that we force ourselves to constantly update iconography because the metaphors are outdated, I don't agree. Sailors still say "knots", but I bet young ones don't all know why. People say "breadboard" all of the time when building electronics.
Similarly, the very letters of our language evolved out of symbols that meant something to some humans long ago, just as words have an etymology.
People simply start to associate icon with action. Mail on my Mac is represented by a postage stamp. I never realized that until I just analyzed it. Good icons are subconscious like that.
Perhaps to you. But a lot of icons you never really look carefully at and realise what they are. They are merely coloured shapes which you use to interact.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadWhen something else becomes iconic that replaces it.
A more humanistic approach would be to save versioned history of everything you do and then "save" by marking points in time as versions you would like to share with other people or systems.
Similarly there are still plenty of microphones that look like that, they're professional microphones, not "old fashioned" ones.
What's the alternative, pick something abstract that confuses people. That didn't work out so well for the recent GMail redesign.
It's thousands of years old, thus despite our ability to record and learn from history, we should replace it with something more modern.
It doesn't really matter as long as it's roughly ubiquitous, which the floppy drive is. It doesn't even matter if no one's seen a floppy drive; if someone doesn't recognize what the floppy icon does, then the rest of their computer is new to them and they're learning. Once learned, forget about it.
Etc.
And crashed beige boxes for Windows machines mounted on Macs: http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2007/10/generi.... :-)
And when did we all get rid of wrenches? I didn't get that memo.
I agree some of the actual system specific icons and metaphors are outdated and junk, but I guess I'm in the camp that thinks these basic metaphors are actually useful in the education of computer interface / mechanisms.
They might have been metaphors once, now they are idioms.
The people who "have never known a world without computers" have also never known a world where there weren't filesystem folders and files.
"Discover" is made of "dis-cover", meaning "remove the things covering the other thing." The "inter" in "interaction" implies movement between objects in a physical space. To "take advantage" evokes physically grasping something.
Perhaps this is more philosophical than you wanted, but I doubt we'll be leaving behind physical metaphors anytime soon.
Envelopes are still used for lots of things. I still get mail.
I use screwdrivers pretty often, and I have access to wrenches.
I recognize the old microphones from movies (and even if I didn't, they look similar to newer mics.)
I've also used a polaroid in the past 5 years.
I've also seen TV sets with "rabbit ears" in the past 5 years.
The others I'm at least familiar with. I'm 18.
(I'd draw an analogy to "Why do we inherently understand menu items written in English?" We don't inherently understand them (witness non-English speakers); we just get to draw on our existing familiarity with English to make the understanding easier.)
See the difference?
"When things, signs or actions are freed from their respective ideas, concepts, essences, values, points of reference, origins and aims, they embark upon an endless process of self-reproduction. Yet things continue to function long after their ideas have disappeared, and they do so in total indifference to their own content. The paradoxical fact is that they function even better under these circumstances."
Jean Baudrillard from "The Transparency of Evil"
http://www.amazon.com/The-Transparency-Evil-Extreme-Phenomen...
Exactly as radley says. The rectangle in my quote here means '[send] email' (whic itself is anachronistic; emessage?).
Programmers know why, but users don't. Same goes for icons: designers know what they're doing & why...
http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7233/7169306722_60b500bf36.jpg
Munch munch! It's fun to play stupid, right?
Out computer verbs are based off of (admittedly, maybe outdated) similar verbs. Our electronic work mirrors our physical work solely because of the limitations of our language constructs. I have it on good authority that there is not a single language that has words that that specifically define what we do on a computer that would be better suited and more efficient than a physical-describing counterpart.
So, as mentioned earlier, the floppy metaphor: OK, I get it. But clipboards, bookmarks, Manila folders? How would you describe an object that lets you take information from one place to another in 32px? What physical object are you aware of that allows you to mark your place amidst a vast density of information? Don't even get me started on the folders.
It's coy to label them "old-people icons" -- it's clever, I dig it -- but if tomorrow we were to unveil a new set of nouns and verbs to describe computer objects, the reigning argument would be that they never made sense at all.
And have fun trying to explain to your grandfather/mother/nephew how to uses computer without having any real-world jargon to borrow from.
> Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool they've never used in their lives.
What have screwdrivers and wrenches been replaced with?
(cynical) A trash can followed by a trip to Wal-Mart.
When icons fail to be understood, they can fail hard. I spent a lot of time frustrated with the new gmail design until I changed the icons to text.
http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6034/6310566055_4a5f5d4a53_b.j...
Or maybe they've learned all these icons and while not getting what they did mean, they understand what they mean now, like letters of a new alphabet. Like how many Asian script characters are descendants of more obvious pictograms of actions. They still have meaning even if they've evolved a bit and even changed.
It's a common practice to look for it on Google images, i.e. "Save Icon", and see if there's a common metaphor. If not, you look for similar use cases - something so that it's much quicker for users to grok what it does.
That's the fundamental purpose after all.
This was the problem with Google/Android's new icons as well as GitHub. Google got caught up with minimization and left out the telling differentiators. Githup went nuts on illustration and lost the original meanings.
Even worse is the Easter-egg UIs that are becoming a widespread problem: There's no icon (or even control) at all until you accidentally roll the cursor over the area. WTF? Are users supposed to sweep across every pixel on the screen now, looking for hidden goodies?
In contrast, HN is a text-dominant application designed for text-dominant users...
Pinching to zoom in and out makes a lot of sense in my mind. Place your thumb and index finger at two points on a map/image/website. Those two points are two corners of a visual area. To make that visual area larger, expand the points outward. To make the area smaller, pinch inward. This conceptual mapping is very straightforward.
> Children invented their own vocabulary to define terms on the computer, for example, “sui” (needle) for the cursor, “channels” for websites and “damru” (Shiva’s drum) for the hourglass (busy) symbol.
from http://hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/paper02.pdf
In another of his papers, Prof Mitra wrote about how "aspirational learning" could be conducted, in the sense of letting children watch interesting and inspiring videos from TED Talks, et al, which would inspire kids to consider what they could do for the world with dreams, technology, and hard work. I think that's absolutely a great thing to spread. In too many places people don't do new things simply because they don't realise they are possible.
Generally when you farther back, items become more differentiated and easily identifiable. A lot of these cross over with computer icons - telephones, antennas, alarm clocks. I really wish I could find a good listing for this type of thing, but my google fu is failing me.
> I tried this on my 9 and 13 year old nephews. I asked what does this button mean? "Save" they both answered immediately. Then I asked what the image looks like? They had no idea - not even a suggestion (which is fair since they haven't ever seen a disk). So I guess the meaning has overriden the image itself in the icon so we're stuck with it.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1019573/save-icon-still-a...
Save is going away. Save As is going the way of "duplicate"/"fork".
I've been using that workflow for nearly a year now, and it's still driving me batty. It's inconvenient and backward, and I hope it gets reverted.
Most of the awkwardness in Lion came from the shortcut keys having been wrong and the effect having been jarring for its lack of vestigial commands to ease the minds of those not-yet-convinced.
My SO, though, finds it downright fantastic.
Take folders. They look like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/50/Earthwise.jpg
That makes it obvious where the symbol is coming from. The only problem is that those kinds of folders are not commonly used in Germany. I think I never saw a folder like that before I started using computers.
Folders look like this in Germany: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Lever_arc...
The word that is used in Germany to refer to folders („Ordner“ in German) actually refers to ring binders.
Yet I had never a problem dealing with folders on computers, even though the visual metaphor was unfamiliar to me.
The simple reason the save icon still looks like a floppy disk is because everyone expects it to look like that.
After reviewing the author, filed under: Comedy!
> I don't see any reason that we couldn't be storing our files in abstract squares rather than folders in the sky.
...because they're called folders, and we know how to use them? If I said, "Here, have a square," is your first instinct really to think oh! that must be for putting stuff in/on? Sure, you can abstract them to just a symbol but it's unnecessary. It's not like the system cares what you call it or how you choose to display it.
> The world's most advanced phones include an icon that looks like a phone handset that you haven't touched in 20 years, unless you've used a pay phone recently.
I have in fact, but that's not the point. Again, we know the shape. There aren't many things it could be besides a phone. You could show someone a glossy brick I guess, but what good would that do? The best alternative I can think of would be something like a speaker or microphone, but where's the argument that that would actually be better?
> At some time in the past the magnifying glass became the "search everywhere" icon, but for some reason binoculars are for searching within a document.
I'm just now realizing that he must be thinking of a specific piece of software. I gathered he was on Windows, now I see he worked at MS. Is this Office? This one I agree with, but it sounds like a quirky error made by some engineer or perhaps phony UX consultant. Same goes for the clipboard– hell if I know why MS would use that icon for paste, but in no other software that I can think of is that normal.
> Envelopes
Same thing as folders. So our terminology expanded to cover abstract digital entities, but that doesn't make it a hinderance to our intuition. Folders, packages, envelopes... maybe they're too nostalgic for the bold futurist, but generally it's about as practical as you can get.
> Wrenches and Gears Who hasn't used a screwdriver? Or never seen a wrench? Even the people who don't own one probably know what it is. I'm indifferent to the gears/tools thing. It still makes sense, but I'm open to new ideas– preferably a little more clever than a circuitboard.
> Microphones For speech recognition, would an ear be better? I think most people would get the microphone bit simply from watching cartoons, talkshows, album covers etc... but I admit this will likely be more foreign in the future, and is already disconnected from people in developing countries without that much media exposure (although they apparently have an iPhone/Pad/Pod).
> Photography It's kitsch. It still makes sense because the alternative to a square with a border is a square without a border. But for all of us who still use medium/large format cameras from time to time or for work, we can simply pretend. Lenses are a-OK.
> Televisions Actually, for the large number of people who gave up cable for hulu and netflix but still want to catch the news– yes! I do have rabbit ears! Maybe it's a little too retro for most video icons, but again– it till makes sense, it just may be better suited to apps that show live broadcasts.
> Carbon Copies and Blueprints Eh, so the term's (carbon copy) a bit outdated. But then again, when was the last time I "pasted" a document together? Yeah, Drawing I. As for blueprints... it makes sense for XCode right? And CAD. We may not use blueprints so often anymore, but it's less ambiguous than "construction documents," which might as well be "layouts". Which might as well be squares with a shape on them. Etc...
Basically, this would be a far more interesting post if the author would go further into making actual suggestions. Some of it makes sense because it's intuitive, some of it makes sense because we're used to it. If you want to correct the latter, you've got to show something what's better.
Edit: ouch, that's an ugly post. Not sure if I can format it in any way.
Also, I'm looking forward ...
That's easy. When you copy something you place it onto the clipboard, when you past it you are pulling a copy off the clipboard.
What's the point in inventing a new term for something, when this one makes sense and is widely understood?
So "copy and paste" or "copy and glue". How does pasting go with copying? I copy something to the clipboard (...whatever) and then copy it from the clipboard to my document. How is that like gluing something? It really makes no sense.
And then I remember cutting. "Cut and paste" makes more sense. You might cut something out of a magazine and glue it onto a collage. Okay.
But the point is that none of this matters. "Paste" is a new word that means to copy something from your "clipboard" to the current location. It's not a metaphor anymore, it's a thing in its own right. A new definition for an old word.
To give an example, the word "microphone" has only been used to represent modern microphones since 1929. The term referred to the mouthpiece for a telephone between 1929 and ~1878, and from ~1878 until 1683, it described ear trumpets.[1]
[1] http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&s...
So what can the system use for icons? Rows of "smartphone" icons or "computer" icons?
(As a text-mode purist, I am not too sad about this.)
Historically they were called directories, which I would love to see a return to from the wrong and infantilizing "folders".
Probably too late. I work with nice guys, progammers in their late 20s, mid-30s, who have only ever known those as 'folders'.
By convention at work if it's on a unix-y OS it's a directory, if Windows it's a folder. It's just easier that way.
Besides, if you're a programmer on Windows, even if you're really young and started with .NET, I'm pretty sure the API and the MSDN docs still consistently use "directory" throughout.
See, eg:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.directory....
And yes, the floppy disk. Whenever I want to feel old I ask one of them if they know what that icon is, and whether they ever seen one. Best answer: "Yes ... I think I saw one at my grandmother's house ..."
Then I tell them it would fit barely half an mp3 and tell them how many you'd need for the same storage as this 2GB Micro-SD the size of my fingernail :D I love living in the future!
1: filesystem > directories > files 2: Desktop > Folders > Documents
They're both models for (basically) the same thing. The technical incorrectness of folder doesn't interfere with usage in real scenarios, unless you expect Average Joe to be structuring data as opposed to, say, collecting media. Granted, if Average Joe had mild OCD and thought of everything he did as indexes and references to some abstract node then directories clearly makes more sense, but that would be a separate system divorced from the desktop abstraction.
Edit: Being young of course none of this is really hammered in by convention– maybe that's why I don't mind the two abstractions coexisting. Even if the terminology originated in a Windows era, it doesn't bother me in the least that Mac (and others) use it as well (for the reasons stated above).
Why yes, yes I do. Desktop environments are all attempted answers to the question "why is a computer like a writing desk?" The question is absurd in its own right, but carries additional absurdity baggage such as calling all files "documents". A movie is not a document. A computer program in binary form is not a document.
All of my machines boot into bare-ass window managers -- typically either awesome or WindowMaker. It's simple, cruft-free, and leaves more room for the programs I want to run. Aside from the shell I find an activity-based model for launching programs -- such as found in iOS, Android, OLPC, and even Windows 3.1 for pete's sake -- to be infinitely preferable to the document-centric desktop model, which assumes that the user can't fathom a computer without the machine pretending that it is some older, non-computing, manually-operated piece of office equipment.
Even if the terminology originated in a Windows era -- it didn't. It started with the 1984 Macintosh. Funny that, even Apple is moving toward an activity-based model for iOS.
The desktop model's heyday may be passing right in front of us, but more likely than not the consequences are going to lead towards even higher level abstractions. For fertility, and for clarity (so that engineers can talk to engineers, and everyone else doesn't get mistaken for a really stupid engineer).
Because Poe raved on both?
Actually the post points out something interesting - we are in the midst of a transformation from a pictorial communication system to an ideographic language where the connection between symbol and signified becomes arbitrary. Nothing wrong with that "arbitrariness", but the visual language continues to evolve - maybe we'll see a paper clip icon even in "Avengers"-like interfaces for this reason.
(edit: fixed typos)
Until someone trumps the performance of condensor microphones in the studio, this form will remain a current and accepted form for speech input.
And yes my TV has rabbit ears, only they are the wifi antennas on my router :)
What would be the point, though? Surely the floppy disk icon has more meaning now as "save" than as the original metaphor of "save to floppy disk." Besides, SD cards are outdated now - I think the only thing of mine which uses it is my camera, and I never actually remove the card. I would guess that more people would recognize the floppy disk than the sd card.
The headline refers to "people icons" that are old. I went to see how many people icons there could even be. Turns out that what he really means is old-people icons.
"folders": we can go back to "directories" if you'd like. It's still what I say most of the time.
"wrenches/screwdrivers/gears": This was the most baffling one. Who's never used a screwdriver? And he says it as if it's obvious.
"phone": 75% of the US still has a landline (as of a year ago anyway), so I find "you haven't used this in 20 years" to be a rather dumb statement too.
"tv antenna": Antennas have actually come back recently when broadcast stations switched to digital and HD feeds. This would have been a better criticism ten years ago, and makes him the one that sounds out of date.
When I saw the article title, I figured "floppy disk" = "save". And sure, that's somewhat valid. But as others have pointed out, it's idiomatic. It happens in language all the time: people still say that someone is given "free rein" even if nobody involved has ever ridden a horse.
If it's a really good take - do they say that's "a burn to disk" - instead of a print?
The page I linked was literally the first google image result for me, and that top cluster of images includes many recognizeable clip-art phones, all with the same rotary phone shape.
1. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/01/getting-the-intervi...
Even if he did, like the folders and envelopes he also mentions, corded phones which look like the picture are still quite common in office places and thus many peoples lives outside of silicon valley.
https://www.google.com/search?q=cisco+handset&hl=en&...
Similarly, the very letters of our language evolved out of symbols that meant something to some humans long ago, just as words have an etymology.
People simply start to associate icon with action. Mail on my Mac is represented by a postage stamp. I never realized that until I just analyzed it. Good icons are subconscious like that.
log: "from log (n.1) which is so called because a wooden float at the end of a line was cast out to measure a ship's speed. General sense by 1913."
Source: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=log&allowed_in_...
Honestly? I don't believe you. The postage stamp is in no way subtle - in fact, it couldn't be more obvious.